Embodiments of the invention relate to data structure processing, in particular, for hierarchical data structure processing that permits readers to access data without having to wait for the acquisition of concurrency mechanisms.
There is an increasing trend towards doing business intelligence (BI) queries on real-time data in databases or tabled data. Traditionally, there is a strict separation between BI systems and online transaction processing (OLTP) systems. There is increasing market pressure for operational BI, and for both transactions and analytics to be performed on the same database.
Dictionaries (data structures supporting lookups and inserts and possibly deletes/updates) are often organized hierarchically. These dictionaries perform poorly on multi-core machines because readers have to acquire read latches to prevent concurrent writers from possibly corrupting or freeing parts of the data structure that they are reading.